Telling the Truth through Rational Argument:
C. S. Lewis on the Reasonableness of Christian Faith
Alister McGrath
King’s College London
It is a great pleasure to be able to contribute to Westminster Abbey’s series of
public lectures on ‘Telling the Truth’ by exploring how C. S. Lewis used rational
argument to commend and communicate the Christian faith. Lewis is now
firmly established as one of the greatest apologists of the twentieth century,
with a continuing legacy of influence in the twenty-first. Few apologists have
achieved anything approaching his impact, which transcends denominational
barriers.
Lewis was British, and a layman of the Church of England. The decision to
honour him here at Westminster is an important reaffirmation of his cultural
and religious identity, here at the heart of the British religious and political
establishment. Lewis’s genius is such that he is loved and valued far beyond
the confines of Great Britain and the Church of England; yet, as the recent
anniversary events here in Britain have made abundantly clear – attendances
have been huge! – Lewis is both remembered and admired here, in this nation
and church.
Lewis also appeals to both fans and academics. If I might borrow a phrase from
John Chrysostom, an early fifth century archbishop of Constantinople, his
works are such that children can paddle in them, and elephants can swim. The
point that Chrysostom was making was that the Bible – or at least John’s
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gospel – could be read and appreciated at multiple levels, popular and
academic. And that is most certainly true of Lewis! Lewis is read and loved by a
wide readership. Yet this anniversary year has marked an important transition,
in that Lewis is now being taken with increased seriousness by academics,
especially at Oxford and Cambridge. Many of you will have read Rowan
Williams’s brilliant engagement with Narnia. It is surely significant that one of
the world’s greatest theologians, a former archbishop of Canterbury who is
now Master of Lewis’s old Cambridge college, takes such delight in Narnia, and
helps us find new depths of meaning within it.
This recognition is long overdue. The foundations for this recognition were laid
as long ago as 1946, when the ancient Scottish University of St Andrews
awarded Lewis the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. Professor Donald
Baillie, Dean of the university’s Faculty of Divinity, declared that Lewis had
‘succeeded in capturing the attention of many who will not readily listen to
professional theologians,’ and had ‘arranged a new kind of marriage between
theological reflection and poetic imagination.’ The passing of time has
confirmed that Baillie was right on both counts. Perhaps, to use a musical
image, Lewis is better seen as an arranger than as a composer. But some of his
theological ‘arrangements’ and ‘variations on themes’ seem to have captured
the popular imagination, where the originals did not.
So what is Lewis’s approach to telling the truth, and why has it been so
successful? In this lecture, I am going to explore Lewis’s distinctive
understanding of the rationality of faith, which emphasises the reasonableness
of Christianity without imprisoning it within an impersonal and austere
rationalism.
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Lewis himself was an atheist as a younger man, convinced of the fundamental
irrationality of faith, and its incapacity to accommodate the brutality and
senselessness of the Great War, in which he fought from 1917-18. Yet Lewis’s
decision to limit himself to a rationalist worldview proved to be imaginatively
sterile and uninteresting, leaving him existentially dissatisfied. It became clear
to Lewis that pure reason offered him a bleak intellectual landscape that he
could not bear to inhabit. Yet this, his reason insisted, was all that there was.
To believe otherwise was pure fantasy. Lewis’s imagination taught him that
there had to be more. ‘Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly
all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.’
Lewis’s study of English literature, especially the poetry of George Herbert, left
him with gnawing doubts about his atheism. Herbert and others seemed able
to connect up with a world that Lewis was tempted to dismiss as illusory, yet
which haunted his imagination. ‘On the one side, a many-islanded sea of
poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism.’ Might, Lewis
wondered, the deepest intuitions of his imagination challenge the shallow
truths of his dogmatic reason? And even triumph over it?
So how did Lewis break free from this rationalist prison? Lewis’s understanding
of the reasonableness of the Christian faith rests on a distinct way of grasping
the rationality of the created order, and its ultimate grounding in God. Where
some favour deductive arguments for the existence of God, Lewis offers his
own distinct approach which is more inductive than deductive; more visual
rather than purely rational.
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Lewis’s approach is difficult to simplify, as it is highly nuanced. But perhaps we
could set out the key aspects of his approach as follows. The truths of the
Christian faith lie beyond the reach of human reason; yet when those truths
are presented and grasped, their rationality can easily be discerned. And one
hallmark of that rationality is the ability of the Christian faith to make things
intelligible.
It is clear that Lewis was drawn to Christianity because of both its intellectual
capaciousness and its imaginative appeal. It made sense of things, without
limiting itself to what could be understood or grasped by reason. Lewis, it
seems to me, echoes a theme we find in in the final canto of Dante’s Divine
Comedy, where the great Florentine poet and theologian expresses the idea
that Christianity provides a vision of things – something wonderful which can
be seen, yet which proves resistant to verbal expression:
From that moment onwards my power of sight exceeded
That of speech, which fails at such a vision.
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che’l parlar mostra, ch’a tal vista cede. Paradiso XXXIII, 55-6.
For Lewis, there is always a sense of a ‘beyond’, a ‘numinous’ – something of
enormous significance that lies beyond our reason, hinted at more by intuition
than by logic. This point had been made earlier by G. K. Chesterton (who Lewis
greatly admired). ‘Every true artist’, Chesterton argued, feels ‘that he is
touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen
through the veil.’ While the intellectual capaciousness of the Christian faith can
be rationally analysed, Lewis hints that it is best imaginatively communicated.
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Lewis invites us to see Christianity as offering us a standpoint (a Platonic
synoptikon, if you like) from which we may survey things, and grasp their
intrinsic interconnectedness. We see how things connect together. Lewis
consistently uses a remarkably wide range of visual metaphors – such as sun,
light, blindness, and shadows – to help us understand the nature of a true
understanding of things. Where some argue that rationality concerns the
ability of reason to give an account of things, Lewis frames this more in terms
of our ability to see their relationships. This has two highly significant
consequences.
First, it means that Lewis sees reason and imagination as existing in a
collaborative relationship. Reason without imagination is potentially dull and
limited; imagination without reason is potentially delusory and escapist. Lewis
develops a notion of ‘imagined’ – not imaginary – reality, which is capable of
being grasped by reason and visualised by the imagination.
Secondly, it means that Lewis makes extensive use of verbal illustrations or
analogies, to enable us to see things in a new way. Lewis’s famous apologetic
for the doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity suggests that our difficulties
arise primarily because we fail to see it properly. If we see it another way – as,
for example, an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world might try to grasp and
describe the structure of a three-dimensional reality – then we begin to grasp
its intrinsic rationality. Lewis’s apologetic often takes the form of a visual
invitation: ‘Try seeing it this way!’ The rationality of the Trinity needs to be
shown, not proved – and it is shown by allowing us to see it in the right way.
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Perhaps this helps us appreciate the special appeal of Lewis’s ‘Chronicles of
Narnia’, which present a way of seeing things, embodied within stories, which
turns out to be rationally plausible and imaginatively attractive. Lewis’s Oxford
colleague Austin Farrer suggested that Lewis’s apologetic approach might
initially look like an argument; but on closer inspection, it turned out to be an
encouragement to see things in a new way, and thus grasp the rationality of
faith. Lewis, Farrer suggested, makes us ‘think we are listening to an
argument’, when in reality ‘we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision
that carries conviction’.
For example, consider Lewis’s imaginative visualization of a theological truth –
the entrapment of the human soul through sin in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn
Treader.’ Lewis’s opening line in this book is seen by many as one of its most
memorable features: ‘There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he
almost deserved it.’ Eustace Scrubb is portrayed as a thoroughly
unsympathetic character, whom Lewis develops as an example of selfishness.
It’s difficult to like him to begin with, and it’s just as difficult to feel sorry for
him when he changes into a dragon as a result of his ‘greedy, dragonish
thoughts.’
The thoroughly obnoxious Eustace encounters some enchanted gold. He
believes this will make him the master of all! But instead, it masters him. Lewis
loved old Norse mythology, and borrowed the Norse story about the greedy
giant Fáfnir, who turned himself into a dragon to protect his ill-won gain. So
Eustace becomes a dragon. Now having become a dragon, how does Eustace
stop being one? Lewis presents Eustace’s initial transformation into a dragon
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and his subsequent ‘undragoning’ as a double transformation that reveals both
Eustace’s selfish, fallen nature and the transforming power of divine grace.
The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” provides a brilliant description of Eustace
realizing, to his horror, that he has become a dragon. He doesn’t like this at all,
and he frantically tries to scratch off his dragon’s skin. Yet each layer he
removes merely reveals yet another layer of scales beneath it. He simply
cannot break free from his prison. He is trapped.
But salvation lies to hand. Aslan appears, and tears away at the dragon flesh
with his claws. And when the scales are finally removed, Aslan plunges the raw
and bleeding Eustace into a well from which he emerges purified and renewed,
with his humanity restored. The storyline is dramatic, realistic, and shocking.
But the power of the narrative brings home the Christian themes that Lewis
believed could not be described as effectively through a series of wellintentioned theological lectures. And while Lewis drew his dragon imagery
from Norse mythology, the story of the ‘undragoning’ draws on the rich ideas
and imagery of the New Testament.
So what are we to learn from this powerful and shocking story, so realistically
depicted? As the startlingly raw imagery of Aslan tearing at Eustace’s flesh
makes clear, Eustace has been trapped by forces over which he has no control.
The one who would be master has instead been mastered. The dragon is a
symbol, not so much of sin itself, as of the power of sin to entrap, captivate,
and imprison. It can only be broken and mastered by the redeemer. Aslan is
the one who heals and renews Eustace, restoring him to what he was intended
to be.
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The immersion in the water of the well is immediately familiar, picking up on
the New Testament’s language about baptism as dying to self and rising to
Christ (Romans 6). (The omission of this aspect of the “undragoning” of
Eustace in the recent movie version of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” was
one of the more irritating and unnecessary of its many weaknesses.) Eustace is
then tossed into the well by Aslan, and emerges renewed and restored.
You see my point. Lewis takes a classic theological doctrine, and transposes it
into a narrative – a narrative that is embraced imaginatively, and not simply
rationally understood. He breathes new life into a traditional doctrine by
inviting us to see it. We are shown what sin is all about, not told about it.
Although some have tried to force Lewis into a purely rationalist way of
thinking, this does not do him justice. Lewis does not try to prove the existence
of God on a priori grounds. Instead, Lewis invites us to see how what we
observe in the world around us and experience within us ‘fits’ the Christian
way of seeing things. Lewis often articulates this way of ‘seeing things’ in terms
of a ‘myth’ – that is to say, a story about reality which both invites its
‘imaginative embrace’, and communicates a conceptual framework, by which
other things are to be seen. The imagination embraces the narrative; reason
consequently reflects on its contents.
So how does this approach to the reasonableness of faith work out in practice?
Let’s consider Lewis’s celebrated ‘argument from desire’, exploring both its
rational structure and its apologetic appeal.
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The starting point for Lewis’s approach is an experience – a longing for
something undefined and possibly undefinable, that is as insatiable as it is
elusive. Lewis sets out versions of this argument at several points in his
writings, including the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’. The most important statements
of the argument, however, are the following:
1. The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), written shortly after his conversion to
Christianity, in which Lewis sets out an allegorical account of his own
conversion, focusing on the theme of desire.
2. The university sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’, preached in Oxford in June
1941, and subsequently published as an article in the journal Theology. This is
the most elegant statement of the argument, which is here framed primarily in
terms of the human quest for beauty.
3. The talk ‘Hope’, given during the third series of Broadcast Talks for the
British Broadcasting Corporation during the Second World War, and
subsequently reproduced as a chapter in Mere Christianity. This is generally
considered to be Lewis’s most influential statement of the argument.
4. The autobiographical work Surprised by Joy, in which the theme of ‘Joy’
plays a significant role in arousing Lewis’s openness towards God.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis described his childhood experiences of intense
longing (which he names ‘Joy’) for something unknown and elusive, triggered
off by such things as the fragrance of a flowering currant bush in the garden of
his childhood home in Belfast, or reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem
in the style of the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér. Lewis’s epiphany of ‘Joy’ bathed
his everyday world of experience with beauty and wonder. But what did it
mean – if it meant anything at all? What way of seeing it might help him to
make sense of it? How was he to interpret it?
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While an atheist, Lewis dismissed such experiences as illusory. Yet he became
increasingly dissatisfied with such simplistic reductive explanations. His
growing familiarity with what he termed the ‘Christian mythology’ – Lewis here
uses the term ‘myth’ in the sense of a ‘narrated worldview’ – led him to
appreciate that these experiences could easily and naturally be accommodated
within its explanatory framework. What if God were an active questing
personal agent, as Christianity affirmed to be the case? If so, God could easily
be understood as the ‘source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at
me ever since childhood.’
In the sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’, Lewis develops this theme further by
exploring the human quest for beauty. Lewis argues that this is really a search
for the source of that beauty, which is mediated through the things of this
world, but not contained within them. ‘The books of the music in which we
thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them: it was not in
them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.’
Without a Christian way of seeing things, this longing remains ‘uncertain of its
object’. Its true goal remains to be identified and attained.
Christianity, Lewis declares, gives us the intellectual framework that both
interprets the experience, and leads us to its true goal. In his own way, Lewis
reworks the point so famously made by T. S. Eliot in Dry Salvages:
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
And approach to the meaning restores the experience.
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In Mere Christianity, Lewis sets out this approach in a somewhat different way,
while still appealing to the elusiveness of our experiences of ‘Joy’. The
experiences he had in mind are shared across the human spectrum, often
expressed in quotidian language as a sense of there being ‘something there’.
The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, spoke of ‘a
nostalgic yearning, bordering at times on unendurably poignant sorrow’, which
he experienced in ‘the dreams of my heart and in the reveries of my soul.’
Bertrand Russell, one of the most articulate and influential British atheist
writers of the twentieth century, put a similar thought into words as follows:
The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain . . . a searching
for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured
and infinite – the beatific vision, God – I do not find it, I do not think it is
to be found – but the love of it is my life . . . it is the actual spring of life
within me.
Russell’s daughter, Katharine Tait, recalled that he was contemptuous of
organized religion, dismissing its ideas mainly because he disliked those who
held them. Yet Tait took the view that her father’s life was really an
unacknowledged, perhaps disguised, search for God. ‘Somewhere at the back
of my father’s mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depths of his soul, there
was an empty space that had once been filled by God, and he never found
anything else to put in it.’ Russell was now haunted by a ‘ghost-like feeling of
not belonging in this world.’
These are the kinds of experience to which Lewis appeals – a sense of hovering
on the brink of discovering something of immense significance, linked with a
sense of sorrow and frustration when what seemed to be so close tantalizingly
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disappears. Like smoke, it cannot be grasped. As Lewis puts it: ‘There was
something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades
away in the reality.’ So what does this sense of unfulfilled longing mean? To
what does it point?
Some, Lewis concedes, might suggest that this frustration arises from looking
for its true object in the wrong places; others that, since further searching will
only result in repeated disappointment, there is simply no point trying to find
something better than the present world.
Yet Lewis suggests that there is a third approach, which recognizes that these
earthly longings are ‘only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage’ of our true
homeland. Since this overwhelming desire cannot be fulfilled through anything
in the present world, this suggests that its ultimate object lies beyond the
present world. ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can
satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world’.
Here, as throughout his apologetic writings, the starting point of Lewis’s
approach does not lie with the Bible or the Christian tradition, but with shared
human experience and observation. How do we make sense of them? Lewis’s
genius as an apologist lay in his ability to show how a ‘viewpoint’ which was
derived from the Bible and the Christian tradition was able to offer a more
satisfactory explanation of common human experience than its rivals –
especially the atheism he had once himself espoused.
Lewis’s apologetic approach is to identify a common human observation or
experience, and then show how it fits in, naturally and plausibly, within a
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Christian way of looking at things. For Lewis, Christianity provided a ‘big
picture’, an intellectually capacious and imaginatively satisfying way of seeing
things. Lewis was always emphatic that nothing can be proved on the basis of
observation or experience. Yet while such observations of nature or our own
experiences prove nothing, they can suggest certain possibilities, and even
intimate what they might mean. That’s what Lewis is getting at when he
writes:
A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an
experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify
any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we
are now considering); she will help to show what it means.
A similar approach is found in G. K. Chesterton, who once remarked that: ‘The
phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon.’
Lewis’s approach could be framed like this. Christianity holds that the natural
order – including our own reasoning – is shaped by the God who created all
things. As Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal had argued before him, Lewis
affirms that the absence of God causes us to experience longing – a yearning
for God, which we misinterpret as a longing for something located within the
finite and created order. Conversion is thus partly about a semiotic
transformation, in which we realize that something we believed to be pointing
to one thing in fact points to something rather different.
We could set Lewis’s argument out more formally as follows. We experience
desires that no experience in this world seems able to satisfy. Yet Christianity
tells us that we are made for another world. And when things are seen in this
way, this sort of experience is exactly what we would expect. The appeal is not
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so much to cold logic, as to intuition and imagination, resting on an imaginative
dynamic of discovery. Lewis invites his audience to see their experiences
through a set of Christian spectacles, and notice how these bring what might
otherwise be fuzzy or blurred into sharp focus. For Lewis, the ability of the
Christian faith to accommodate our experience, naturally and easily, is an
indicator of its truth.
As Lewis states this approach from desire, therefore, it is not really an
argument at all; it is more about observing and affirming the fit between a
theory and observation. It is like trying on a hat or shirt for size. How well does
it fit? How many of our observations of the world can it accommodate, and
how persuasively? Lewis’s way of thinking also shows some similarity to a
related approach within the natural sciences, now generally known as
‘inference to the best explanation’. This approach recognizes that there are
multiple explanations of observations, and suggests how criteria might be
identified to determine which such explanation is to be considered as ‘the
best’.
The same approach is found in Lewis’s ‘argument from morality.’ This is
sometimes portrayed in ridiculously simplistic terms – for example,
‘experiencing a sense of moral obligation proves there is a God.’ Lewis did not
say this, and did not think this. As with the ‘argument from desire’, his
argument is rather than the common human experience of a sense of moral
obligation is easily and naturally accommodated within a Christian framework.
For Lewis, experiences and intuitions – for example, concerning morality and
desire – are meant to ‘arouse our suspicions’ that there is indeed ‘Something
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which is directing the universe.’ We come to suspect that our moral experience
suggests a ‘real law which we did not invent, and which we know we ought to
obey’, in much the same way as our experience of desire is ‘a kind of copy, or
echo, or mirage’ of another place, which is our true homeland. And as we track
this suspicion, we begin to realize that it has considerable imaginative and
explanatory potential. What was initially a dawning suspicion becomes
solidified as a growing conviction that it makes sense of what matters to us
naturally and persuasively.
So what can be learned from Lewis’s approach? Perhaps I could mention two
points in bringing this lecture to a close. First, Lewis helps us see that
apologetics need not take the form of a slightly dull deductive argument, but
can be understood and presented as an invitation to step into the Christian
way of seeing things, and explore how things look when seen from its
standpoint. ‘Try seeing things this way!’ If worldviews or metanarratives can be
compared to lenses, which of them brings things into sharpest focus?
And second, we need to realize that Lewis’s explicit appeal to reason involves
an implicit appeal to the imagination. Perhaps this helps us understand why
Lewis appeals to both modern and postmodern people. I see no historical
evidence that compels me to argue that Lewis deliberately set out to do this,
constructing a mediating position between two very different cultural moods.
The evidence suggests that he saw things this way naturally, and never
formalized it in terms of a synthesis of these two very different modalities of
thought. Lewis rather gives us a synoptikon which transcends the great divide
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between modernity and postmodernity, affirming the strengths of each, and
subtly accommodating their weaknesses.
Yes, Lewis affirms the rationality of the universe – but does so without
plunging us into an imaginatively drab world of cold logic and dreary
argumentation. Yes, Lewis affirms the power of images and narratives to
captivate our imagination – but does so without giving up on the primacy of
truth. As the churches face an increasingly complex cultural context in which
they must preach and minister, Lewis offers insights and approaches that are
potentially enriching – and, I venture to suggest, culturally plausible and
intellectually persuasive.
In the end, Lewis tells the truth by showing the truth. He offers us an
intellectually capacious and imaginatively compelling vision of the Christian
faith, perhaps best summed up in his lapidary statement at the end of his essay
‘Is theology poetry?’ Using a powerful visual image, Lewis invites us to see God
as both the ground of the rationality of the world, and the one who enables us
to grasp that rationality. ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has
risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.’ This
beautifully crafted sentence is a fitting memorial both to Lewis himself, and his
rich understanding of faith.
I must end. Let me do so by noting a parallel between Lewis and the great
Genevan reformer John Calvin. Neither Lewis nor Calvin had any children,
through both were stepfathers to children from their wives’ earlier marriages.
When Calvin was mocked by his critics for being childless, he offered an
intriguing rebuttal. Anyone, he declared, who read his books and came to
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share his way of thinking was his child. And when seen that way, Calvin turned
out to have rather a large family! I think the same is true of Lewis. Many of us
find that our ways of thinking have come to be deeply shaped by Lewis; to put
it another way, we share something of his intellectual DNA. Those of us
gathered here today are Lewis’s children, meeting for a family celebration. Not
one of us here today is a physical descendent of Lewis; but we are all linked to
him through our imagination and reason. I think we all share in the delight of
this family occasion, made possible both by the generosity and discernment of
this great institution, Westminster Abbey, and by the genius and talent of C. S.
Lewis himself. May both flourish in the next fifty years!
[END]
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